William Friedkin
By 
One of the members of the great 70s class of movie directors died yesterday, and none of them was more entertaining as a public figure:
Will never forget William Friedkin’s legendary reply in this sit down conversation with Nicolas Winding Refn pic.twitter.com/tqfuuSadfN— Matt Neglia (@NextBestPicture) August 7, 2023
I don’t know if Rob ever blogged about this or just intended to, but Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls is a very interesting book taking advantage of great source material, but it also has a lot of dubious or outright wrong opinions driven by simplistic rise-and-fall narratives. Alas, the Times obituary decided to quote Biskind’s reputation-damaging claim that he never did another good movie after The Exorcist:
No. No no no no no no NO. NO. Hell no. pic.twitter.com/CB3xXPMmva— Bilge Ebiri (@BilgeEbiri) August 7, 2023
I don’t think this is true either way — Sorcerer and To Live and Die in LA hold up better for me than The Exorcist (slthough the problem with the latter are the limitations created by the fundamentally silly source material.) But I think Biskind misses something critical. It’s true that Friedkin, while he took his craft very seriously, was a 70s version of an old-fashioned studio director who was relatively unpretentious and just wanted to do an honest job with a variety of scripts rather than aiming for transcendent masterpieces. And it’s true that even his best work can’t match the best of Scorsese or Coppola or Altman. But it’s not all downside. When Coppola lost the ability to do great films, he also generally wasn’t able to do good studio genre pictures, because he saw them as purely a means to keep going to do his next failed art project like One From the Heart. Friedkin couldn’t salvage a truly bad script like Deal of the Century or Jade, but he made his share of intelligent and entertaining genre pictures — The Brink’s Job, Rampage, Blue Chips, Killer Joe. He wasn’t Scorsese, but there’s a nobility in knowing your own limitations and doing work with integrity within them, and I’m glad that he lived to see a lot of people who take movies seriously challenge the Biskind narrative and re-appraise his work. R.I.P.
…Great stuff from Friend of the Blog Glenn Kenny here.